Is it Possible for God to Provide "Partial Free Will" and Eliminate All Evil?by Rich Deem

Introduction

Partial Free Will?

Numerous atheists have written to us with a proposal on how God could
have allowed "partial free will" and prevented all evil. Of course, their
"solution" was
for God to prevent all evil choices. Therefore, humans could only make good
choices. Is this really "free will?"

Rich Deem

Can God just prevent people from making evil choices, thereby eliminating
evil, while allowing "free will?" On the surface, this idea seems like a simple,
logical solution God could have used in the design of the universe. Okay, let's
try it on a practical problem.

Email and human evil

I have personally experienced the problem of evil and have attempted the
above "solution." The evil that I have attempted to eliminate is "email evil."
Back in 1997, when this site first began, my email address was linked directly
on the front page of the website. One can equate this situation as being
complete "email free will." The problem with complete email free will is that it
encourages the exercise of evil. People devised evil schemes to harvest my email
address and sell it to lots of other evil people who wanted to sell me
insurance, loans, and ED medications. So, my first attempt to prevent email evil
involved setting up a form in which the email address was part of a form.
However, evil people figured out how to harvest the email address from the
"hidden" parts of my form. So, my next step was to use a form that hid my email
address in an "invisible" file separate from the form. I deleted my old email
address and setup a new one. This solution worked for a while. However, some evil people figured out
how to submit multiple emails containing multiple ads using my form. They
didn't need my email address, since they could send me spam automatically, using
my own form software. So, I needed another solution. The next way to prevent
email evil was to use a form that required the user to enter a
randomly-displayed, graphic text image (CAPTCHA).1 The automatic form submitters could not
guess the randomly-generated text, and so were eliminated from sending spam.
Only one time, did a spammer take the time to randomly enter the text from the
graphic image.

However, the website was becoming more and more popular and Google was
ranking a large number of pages high in its search results (probably how most of
you got here). As a result, lots of atheists visited the site (a good thing),
although a significant percentage of those who wrote me (about half) wanted to
leave hate mail (with no constructive criticisms). However, not wanting to be confronted on their evil, they would
usually would not put their email address in the email form box (just some random text).
So, I put in a JavaScript code that checked email addresses for the proper
format. So, the atheists just made up email addresses that didn't exist. I
would spend a few minutes to an hour responding to their email to have it bounce
back as being non-existent. Needless to say, this was very frustrating. The next way to restrict free will was to instigate
a server function (BoxTrapper) that operates on the email account directly. This
program does not deliver any email until the user replies to an auto-response-generated
email. BoxTrapper does not prevent email evil, but does prevent me from having
to deal with the majority of it. However, even after instituting BoxTrapper, there are numerous
atheists who feel the need to call me stupid or ignorant and use expletives to
"prove" their point. So, even though I have taken great pains to reduce the
ability of people to express their evil free will, people still find a way to
get around all those efforts. Maybe I could automatically reject emails that
contain certain words? However, when this is done on discussion boards, the
users get around this ban by inserting "*#%@" at strategic positions within swear
words. Ultimately, efforts to prevent evil do not prevent the source of
evil - the human mind.

Eliminate evil and keep free will?

For those of you who don't get the connection between email and evil, let me
explain the analogy. My efforts to eliminate email evil restrict the ability of
people to commit evil in certain ways. These efforts are analogous to changing
the laws of the universe to restrict the exercise of evil. However, as can be
seen by the results, my efforts restricted only some (although probably the majority) email evil. However, there was no way to eliminate all evil through
changing the "laws of physics," since it originates within the human mind. So,
the only way to eliminate all evil is to actually restrict the
functioning of the human mind - in other words, restrict free will. So, all
claims by atheists that God could prevent all evil choices, but allow free will
are specious. In reality, the atheists' "solution" has taken away human free will and turned
human beings into robots. Although it solves the problem of evil, it destroys
the primary reason why God created the universe in the first place - to allow
free will beings the choice of loving or rejecting Him.2 God finds such a
"solution" unacceptable (Why create a universe in which its primary
purpose is unattainable?). However, this kind of evil-free universe does
exist for those who want it and choose it in this universe. It is called
heaven.

God has restricted evil

The laws of physics of our universe actually do prevent large amounts of evil
that could have been committed by human beings had those laws been different.
For example, extending human life spans to hundreds or thousands of years would
have resulted in evil people living longer and having more time to devise more
evil schemes to perpetrate on their fellow human beings. Additionally, giving
human beings the power to easily travel throughout the universe and manipulate
it at will would have resulted in unimaginable evil. When somebody got angry at
somebody else, they could just hurl another star into that person's planet to
destroy it. So God has created a universe in which, for practical purposes, we
are restricted to our own solar system, and can't really
do anything drastic enough to mess it up. Even a cursory examination of the
universe reveals many ways in which God could have allowed humans the ability to
commit much more evil. To me, it seems likely that the design of this
universe is optimal for the restriction of most evil, while still allowing free
will.

Conclusion

Yes, God could have eliminated all evil in the design of His universe.
However, such a universe would have been unable to accomplish the main purpose
for which God created the universe in the first place - to allow free will
choice by human beings. God has designed the laws of the universe so that human
beings are unable to exhibit unlimited amounts of evil. However, it is not
possible to design a universe in which the exercise of evil is completely
eliminated, since evil begins in the minds of human beings. To restrict the
minds of human beings is to turn them into robots. Although this approach might
seem attractive (especially with some people we know), it would prevent people
from expressing true love - for each other and for God their Creator.